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LWCE Wrapup

Posted by michael on from the little-fuzzy-robots-with-big-sharp-teeth dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Extremetech.com reports that: 'Computer scientists from think tank SRI will present a novel take on distributed computing at LinuxWorld, all in a search for a little lost penguin.' For more information on Centibots, head over to the Centibots Project homepage." ReadthePaper writes "I just read a great interview with Jon "Maddog" Hall of Linux International." And finally, Hawkxor writes "Sun Microsystems VP Jonathon Schwartz demoed Sun's new desktop-oriented Linux distro 'Mad Hatter' and 3-D Desktop Environment 'Looking Glass' at LinuxWorld. Sounds pretty cool."

2 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Typical Sun Quote by __past__ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually, they don't focus on any kind of "free-as-in-foo" part. They focus on the "good-as-in-reliably-solves-problems" part. Not the most stupid thing to base decisions on, and fortunatly some open source developers also consider that important, even if reading /. often suggests otherwise.

    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  2. Re:Typical Sun Quote by __past__ · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If you take, and use open source software for commercial gains, and ensure that the actual open source versions stay one step behind you are basically stealing.
    Whoa. And I thought the RIAA was insane. It is stealing if you use software in compliance with the license the authors themselves chose to publish it under?

    However, lately, they are asking more what open source can do for them than what they can do for open source. Yes, this is a perfectly natural thing for a company to do, but we should hardly praise Sun for the idea of taking Linux, adding a couple of proprietary features and then using it on their workstations and desktops, so that they can get free development.
    Not to mention adding a couple of free features that Linux users (and vendors) get for free. You do realize that they contribute heavily to Gnome, for example? Of course they do it in their own interest - the first version of Solaris with pre-installed Gnome was just released a week or two ago. Still, everything that is not Solaris-specific is now part of mainstream Gnome.

    OpenOffice.org isn't exactly a small contribution either. Sure, they are probably quite happy about unpaid contributors that make their proprietary StarOffice better, but I'd say that this is quite a fair deal. And there are also some smaller projects, like XMLroff, an XSL FO formatter that I personally consider very promising.

    So please, take your "proper attitude" elsewhere and don't talk about things you have no idea about.

    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.